The American Way Of Poverty: How The Other Half Still Lives - Plot & Excerpts
On any Saturday morning, hundreds of people, of all ages, and of all colors, can be found snaking along the sidewalk of West LeHigh Avenue, toward the entrance, sunk several steps below street level, to a large community food center. The pantry is in the basement of a local public library. Down the street from the center the fire-gutted stone-and-brick shell of a huge high school dominates the landscape, looking more like a ruined medieval monastery than a modern-day American urban academy. The smaller side streets are pocked with hundreds of boarded-up houses, and hundreds more in such disrepair that one can only marvel at how people manage to live in them. This is North Philadelphia, one of America’s poorest urban neighborhoods. In 2011, researchers with Pew Charitable Trusts estimated that citywide Philadelphia’s poverty rate stood at 25 percent, with a median household income of barely $37,000. But those numbers hid huge disparities. Some suburbs were as leafy, as affluent as any in America.
What do You think about The American Way Of Poverty: How The Other Half Still Lives?
